1. Field of the invention
The invention relates to a facsimile apparatus and its maintenance cost control apparatus for transmitting various information necessary for control of maintenance charges of the apparatus through general public telephone networks.
2. Description of the related art
The use of facsimile apparatus of the type capable of forming images on plain paper by employing a copying process is increasing, and the rate of troubles occurring in the mechanism employing such a copying process is high. It is desired to strengthen the service organization for maintenance and control purposes due to the necessity of periodic overhaul for maintenance of performance, and in particular quick and accurate countermeasures are required in order to correct troubles promptly.
In the conventional method of maintenance and control, generally, the facsimile apparatus itself detects its own condition, and indicates the nature of trouble or the expected replacement times of specific parts by its display or the like, or displays the nearly empty state of consumable parts, indicating the consumable parts are about to end, so as to inform the user. The user recognizes the state, and if it is considered necessary to call a serviceman, it is reported to the maintenance service station assigned for maintenance and control of the facsimile apparatus by telephone or other means.
Such telephone communication, however, gives rise to the following problems.
(1) The user cannot do his own work when explaining the trouble, and loses time.
(2) The user may misunderstand the trouble message, and wrong information may be transmitted to the maintenance service station.
(3) The user may not notice the trouble message, and in such a case a minor trouble may be promoted to major trouble.
(4) The maintenance service station sends the serviceman by preparing necessary repair parts after receiving the report from the user, and prompt countermeasure is difficult.
More recently, it has been proposed to do maintenance and control by a method in which the user's facsimile detects the own operating state, converts the detected data to communication information, sends it automatically or from the maintenance service station, where the maintenance service station receives the transmitted communication information, and converts it, for example, into character information and prints out the operating state of the user's facsimile (Japanese Patent Application Hei. 1-302749).
For operating such facsimile apparatus smoothly, maintenance control such as supply of consumable parts, periodic inspection of mechanical parts, replacement of parts, and repair of defective parts due to trouble should be clone timely. The maintenance control is generally achieved by a maintenance control agreement contracted between the user and the maintenance service company, and the serviceman of the maintenance service company visits the user periodically or upon request by the user. On that occasion, reading out the counting of the recorded paper counter built in the facsimile apparatus, the maintenance charge is calculated by adding a basic charge to the product of the counting and the unit price, and the amount is billed to the user.
In such control of maintenance charges, the serviceman must visit the user, and it takes much time and labor.
Additionally, the billing and payment status for maintenance charges are known only by specific people in the accounting group of the service company, and are unknown to other people.